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Language, Gender and Culture: Core Indicators of Social Role

The analysis of engendered relationships is that both knowledge and power have historically have been located with men, both individually and as a group, in a way not unlike the Marxist class-warfare analysis of access to social goods. Feminist and Marxist analyses may not be entirely mutually exclusive in that they each interrogate the legitimacy of both social forms of organization and the ideologies that reinforce them. Gender-based analysis, however, makes manifest the engendered quality of social forms, which include social symbols such as language and other cultural cues. From the feminist/gender-analysis standpoint, Marx's analysis of oppressed social classes is considered useful but incomplete. Citing "constructs of multiplicity residing in social structures themselves," Collins (1997, p. 376) says concepts of social inequality are not so straightforward and simple as the designation of class distinctions suggests, that in fact perceptions of social oppression have been made more complex by the introduction of race and gender, which cross the boundaries of intergroup and intragroup experience in the wider context of power relationships (both physical and knowledge-based) that comprise social structure. As social theory, meanwhile, this kind of analysis it is less focused on material praxis (for example, establishment of a Marxist utopia or a public-policy program of women's rights) than on exposing social analyses that have the effect of reinforcing the embedment of "the standpoint of white men as hidden agent and subject" (Smith, 1997, p. 343).

The very terms society, social norms, or social organization, on this view, would have to be interrogated and qualified in analytic context. Who determines what these terms mean, how they are derived, how they are manipulated, and how they are experienced would be as critical to picking out their meaning as the mere accomplished fact of the designated terms. Thus does the role of lang...

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Language, Gender and Culture: Core Indicators of Social Role. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 18:23, August 02, 2015, from http://www.collegetermpapers.com/viewpaper/1303529431.html